Optimizing Efficiency Through Flow

Talk to me about what you think the relationship between work and flow is.

Communicate, plan, resource. Your brain is for having ideas, not holding ideas. It's hard for me to get into a flow state. It's hard for me to have breakthrough innovative big ideas when I'm overwhelmed, when I'm stressed, and I've got a ton of things on my mind. Everyone had very similar issues regardless of size or industry. Individual productivity is necessary but not sufficient for a team to be productive. Ultimately, I want people to work on things that make them happy, that tap into their unique strength. And in order to do that, I'm doing it from the angle of how do I remove the roadblocks and the scavenger hunt and all the wasted time? And operational efficiency is my approach or my contribution towards allowing for more brain space.

What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting. Nothing is ever the same again. Breakthroughs.

Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Rhian Dorris, and together with bestselling author Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.

Welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. I'm Ryan Wicks, Chief of Staff here at FRC, and today I get to sit down with our Executive Director, bestselling author Stephen Kotler, and our guest, Nick Sonnenberg, bestselling author himself with recent— with his recent release, Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work. Good to see you, gentlemen. Nick is an operational efficiency expert who helps teams that are drowning in work. His methods have been shown to create on average, one full business day, that's 8 hours in time savings per week per person. His company Leverage is an efficiency training and consulting firm that trains teams on when and how to use common tools in the workplace. For maximum efficiency. Think email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Asana. He also recently launched a podcast with Jay Abraham called the Optimized Podcast that is essentially a live consulting session where him and Jay help real entrepreneurs solve real problems in their businesses in real time. That's so cool, Nick.

I think that just sounds like pain. The theater pain. But okay, you think it's cool, I think it's the theater pain, but I'm glad Nick's doing it. Okay, next question.

It's really fun.

Uh, no, I think without further ado, Stephen, I'm going to hand the mic over to you. You've got the first question for us to kickstart this discussion, so take it away.

Cool, thanks, Ryan. Nick, it's good to see you again. I've been looking forward to this for a little while. Um, I'm just gonna, uh, I'm going to start where my curiosity starts, which is you started out as a high-frequency trader.

Yeah.

You morphed into an entrepreneur, uh, with a startup, uh, there was a freelancer marketplace. Yeah. And now you're an efficiency expert. Was this the career path you anticipated?

Yeah, it was all laid out perfectly from the time I was 5. Like, this was the, this was the game plan.

This was the game plan. Well, you've executed very well, I have to say. It's It was obvious from the start.

You know, it seems like totally random, but actually, um, I learned a lot as a high-frequency trader, and it really programmed my thinking. Um, that kind of programmed me to think in a certain way that has allowed me to do research and, and content and intellectual property in this space. You know, as a high-frequency trader, for those of you listening that don't know what that is, I'm a mathematician by background, so I would build algorithms and code computers to trade stocks at super high frequency, like nanosecond and microsecond, trying to capture fractions of a penny, knowing nothing about the companies. It was all purely based off of math. So in that space, literally a microsecond can mean millions. And so I'm all day long, headphones on, just trying to, how do I shave a microsecond off this thing? And it was all purely automated. So I really started developing this muscle of celebrating small wins, knowing how to deconstruct a problem into the sum of its microprocesses, the real value of time, and everything was automated. So I really started developing that. After I left, when I was about 30, I had some money in the bank and I went on a vacation to Turks and Caicos. I think I talked about this in the book. My friend was having a piña colada by the pool, working on a startup. And at that point, I always thought, Steve, that I had the coolest job. I was in my 20s, made a ton of money, was managing billions of dollars with all these computer screens. And I thought I had the coolest job. But in that moment, I realized I didn't. This guy, he had the freedom to work wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted, with who he wanted. He didn't have 27 people taking a cut of his bonus. If I make the bank $20 million one year, I'm not feeding 100 people.

We file all of this under famous last words in terms of entrepreneurial strategy. All of this gets filed under famous last words, but you just keep going.

Yeah, the famous last words are eventually I made the jump and I built the first version of Leverage, which was a freelancer marketplace, and we grew very quickly. I was having dinner with my ex-business partner one night on a Sunday. We brainstormed this idea and at the end I was like, I like this idea. How about I build the backend in a day and you get 5 clients tomorrow, which would've been Monday, and let's launch it on Tuesday. And so we did that. And you fast forward a month, um, we're giving, we're giving the day 3 presentation at our mutual friend, Joe Polish's Genius Network annual event. Tony Robbins was the day 2 speaker. And 95% of the group signed up for our services. So all of a sudden, we've got this business. And fast forward a year, we've got 150 people on the team doing 7 figures of revenue, which all sounds impressive, but we made a ton of mistakes. Under the hood, we were completely broken. We were losing $500,000 a year, $750,000 in debt. No one knew who I was because my partner was the face of the business. So literally, Less than maybe 5 people in the company knew me. Um, and one day he picks up and he says he's out. We're having coffee, taps me on the shoulder, and he's like, I'm out. Not in 2 weeks or 2 days, he's out in like literally 2 minutes. And in that moment, I go white and I start sweating because I realized like we're in pretty big trouble. Like literally, he was the face. And, um, it was tough in, in the coming months We lose 40% of revenue. I'm cashing out my 401k. My dad's taking a second mortgage on the house to make payroll. Bank accounts are getting frozen. It was a complete cluster. Let's just say I wasn't in a flow state for much of those coming months. It was fight or flight. But I started realizing if this is going to be salvageable, I need to free up some time. And I started analyzing, where the inefficiencies were and where I was wasting time. It was hard to get any work done because I was just constantly getting pinged and dinged by all these team members all over the world. So just flooded with email, flooded with notifications all over the place. I, so my communication was broken. I couldn't answer basic questions like who's working on what, what's past due, what's the status of this project. So I call that planning that was broken. I knew I needed to fix that. And then one thing that I had the foresight, and we were actually pretty good at, was documenting our processes and our knowledge. And so I call that resources. And without really realizing it, this was the beginning of this framework. That's the core of my book, which is CPR: communicate, plan, and resource. And as I started focusing on those three areas, Steve, this company that was just a sinking ship quickly started turning around. Simultaneously, people started reaching out to me, asking me to consult them on their efficiency. So Tony Robbins reached out, Poo-Pourri, the poop spray, reached out, cryptocurrencies reached out, all through word of mouth. I started seeing this pattern where it didn't matter if you're the world's number one coach, you're a poop spray, financial advisor, everyone had very similar issues regardless of size or industry. Everyone needed to communicate with each other and clean that up. Everyone had tasks and projects or that planning component, and everyone had intellectual property. So I started— this light bulb moment kind of happened, so to speak, where I realized, hey, it's not just me that has this CPR thing. Everyone's benefiting from it. And I decided to reposition my whole company around helping teams and organizations perform better and be operationally efficient. And so now the business has nothing to do with the freelancer marketplace. Now we're doing training and consulting for teams and all these collaboration tools.

Let me ask you a question. I want to roll this back before you started selling drugs to small children. I want to ask you about— I heard you say this on a podcast once, uh, where you were talking about that, that moment where you were sitting with your friend, he's having the piña colada, and you decide you're going to jump from ISB Training into, uh, into that, and you said, I don't want to have any regrets. Yeah, that sounds to me a little bit like a life philosophy. And so we're going to spend most of today talking about work philosophies. I just want to back up for a second and say, is that a life philosophy? Do you have a life philosophy? Where did it develop? How did it evolve? And if you don't, we can jump right into the book.

Well, that's an interesting question. Um, Not having regrets, being able to say I gave something. I don't always need to win, but what I do need is to know if something's important. Like some things, it doesn't matter if you win or lose, but for the most part, I do like to approach life leaving everything on the table and knowing that I gave it my all. When I did my audiobook, I hired a voiceover coach because I wanted to make sure I've got one shot at it. I want my audiobook to be as good as possible. Um, so whatever I approach, I want to make sure that I'm not missing something that's— that would be almost negligent to kind of miss. And the way that I make decisions, a lot of the times I'm making decisions based off of kind of predicting a future state and what will I regret by not doing, and trying to predict what my degree of regret might be. And so in the moment when I was, um, trying to analyze this decision, do I stick with high-frequency trading? I'm in my 20s making a ton of money. It's good. Everyone knows me. I've got stability. Um, versus jumping into this fire pit of chaos and uncertainty. I started thinking about, well, one, I don't have a wife and kids, so like that, that makes it a bit easier. But in 10, 20 years, am I going to re— what's my degree potential of, of regret if I do make the leap versus don't make the leap? And it's once I started really looking at it through the lens of potential regret that it became more clear that I should take the leap.

Do you take a Bayesian approach to regret? Is that what I'm hearing underneath this, that you're trying to lower the probability of regret?

Every, every, everything is stats to me.

That's awesome.

That is awesome. Nick, come up for air. Is is an organizational efficiency book. And I think that statement really doesn't emphasize the incredible level of detail and thought behind the work that you put into it.

But either way—

Thank you.

Can you talk a little bit about, you mentioned a little bit about the origin story of that system. Did you research it any further? You know, you have a background in math. Did you just test the ever-living shit out of this thing? If you did, how?

I view my company as a laboratory, and I like, I like that, you know, you call your company, um, you have the word research in it. I, I view us as a laboratory doing research, and we first— I'll come up with an idea, or a team member might come up with an idea, and we test it internally, and we stress test it, and that's kind of patient zero or client, client one, so to speak. And then once we kind of tinker with things and figure something out, then we'll start testing it on a handful of clients and, you know, get their feedback. So there's a lot of— a lot of this stuff is empirical. It's not—

I would have studied it, but most of the question, when you test it on clients, yeah, because we sometimes will do similar things, and where I'm torn is it's not ethical for me not to tell them I'm testing something on them but it screws up the whole double-blind nature of the test if I tell 'em. So I was just wondering how you wrestle with that.

No, it, I don't think that I face the same issues that you might with the double-blind thing, cuz it's more so, it's not really a feeling that we're testing for, let's say it's more so like, see if this saves you time. We have no idea. This might not work for you. But we'll show them how we're using it and why we, why we're interested in it. Um, but I would have, I would have, um, Ryan done a bunch of research in it, but there, it turns out, and what's kind of why I was excited to write a book on team efficiency is there's not much out there on this topic. You've got people interested in individual productivity, but you know, and there's, you know, 4-Hour Workweek and other. Other books and content out there around how individuals can be productive, but individual productivity is necessary, but not sufficient for a team to be productive. It requires collaboration, coordination, and sometimes individuals need to sacrifice their own productivity for the greater good of the team. And I didn't, at least in my research, never came across any books that were really focused on this team productivity aspect, but I would have researched it if I did find anything good.

Before we dive into the details of that, let me pull back for slightly high level, another high level question. You talk in your book a lot about team efficiency and flow.

Yeah.

So I want to pull back on that just a little bit and talk to me about what you think the relationship between work and flow is, both, you know, in your personally, your own life, and what you see organizationally.

Yeah. Well, I think that one thing that is kind of the common umbrella between flow and efficiency and kind of both of our passions is ultimately we want performance, right? Like ultimately I want people to work on things that make them happy, that tap into their unique strength. And I want— and in order to do that, I'm doing it from the angle of how do I remove the roadblocks and the scavenger hunt and all the wasted time so that we can maximize that ratio of—

Hold on. I'm going to pause. I'm going to ask you to pause. Define a term for me because we're going to use it again and again in a scavenger hunt. Yeah. Okay. Talk just for a second while you fill people in on what that means.

What I call the scavenger hunt.

That's great.

That's the term I use in the book. And a lot of the terms I use, it's just straight from clients. I called my book Come Up for Air because the number one thing people say is drowning in work. When I ask people, where they're wasting time, the number one thing, one of the number one things is, um, they've got a scavenger hunt. So if you're listening right now, the scavenger hunt and the scavenger hunt is anytime you have to look in multiple places for a piece of information. That's just not in the bucket that you were expecting. You know, did Stephen text me or was that an email or was that in Asana or was that in Slack? And you end up spending more time looking for something than oftentimes it takes to get the work done, right? So if you can eliminate that scavenger hunt, which no one likes that, no one gets jazzed up in a flow state to go like, hey, where did I lose my keys today? And you have to go like searching around the house, like you're stressed, you're angry, you're scared. Like no one likes that. So it's the same thing with a document and work. Um, you know, it's just a digital scavenger hunt. And so. How do you remove all that stuff to maximize time spent on things that you like doing? And I think that the relationship between flow and operational efficiency is how can you get into a state of flow when your brain is overwhelmed with stress? Like, oh my God, I've got all this stuff to do. Or you look, David Allen had a great quote. Your brain is for having ideas, not holding ideas. So if you don't have systems to dump things that are in your head and you have to carry around all these things. Like, did I remember to take out the trash? Did I remember to email Stephen? Did I remember to do this? Like, all of that takes up brain space and you'll know on a, you know, the, the medical terms for a lot of these things. I'm not an expert at that, but I do know that in my experience, it's hard for me to get into a flow state. It's hard for me to have breakthrough innovative big ideas when I'm overwhelmed, when I'm stressed, and I've got a ton of things on my mind. So how can I cleanse my mind and free up that brain space for things that are worthy of that brain space? And operational efficiency is my approach or my contribution towards allowing for more brain space.

That makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, no, I love that. Uh, at the core of Leverage is that framework that you mentioned, right? CPR— communicate, plan, and resource. Uh, and you gave us some good context about how you came, you know, to that, to that system. Can you break that down for us a little bit more just so that we have a common starting point for, you know, the broader discussion on it?

Break down the framework? CP&R?

Yeah.

Yeah. And also I'm curious, Stephen, on your side, but I, I find that a lot of my content like this CPR or other things I come up with, it's usually just based off of pain and pain's a great motivator for me. I'm, I'm an engineer, so I like to solve problems. So a lot of things is I'll get extremely frustrated or be in a state of pain. And then I start thinking to myself, how do I never get into this situation again? And that's kind of how a lot of the things that we've developed, um, came about. So take CP&R for example, again, it stands for communicate, plan, and resource. And so if you think about it, it starts with what is communication? Because a lot of people are communicating in a communication tool, but it's, it's not communication. It should be in a task or project management tool. So imagine for a second you were going to go camping in the forest with your team. You would need walkie-talkies to communicate with each other, but that doesn't replace the need for a map to navigate out of the forest. Right? So if I were to say, you know, hey Ryan, let's meet up when you come to New York, I would do that over email because that's communication. I'm just giving you a statement. You're not in my organization. So I'd use email because that's external. Right? If we were on the same team, I'd write that message in Slack or Microsoft Teams.

Okay, hold on, hold on. Just worth pointing out, this is one of Nick's core principles. Email is for external communication only. Slack, those kinds of tools are for internal communication. So you can go dive deeper into that, but I—

sorry, sorry.

I didn't pull up your stuff for you.

Thank you. Thank you for pointing that out. Yeah. So it's all communication and then within communication, separating out email for external, Slack, Microsoft Teams for internal. Now with any tool, and we'll unpack PNR in a second, but with any tool you want to use it to their highest and best use. So you want to know the nuances of how to do threads and third-party integrations and automation and channel naming conventions and With email, you want to know all the settings tricks and how to snooze and, and, you know, best practice of foldering. And like, these are all things that are really important, but it starts with understanding the when before the how. So you have to understand when should you even, what's the mental trigger to even think, hey, I should open up email or hey, I should open up Slack or Microsoft Teams. Right. If you, if your team is aligned on that mental trigger, hey, In this type of scenario, this is the tool we should all use. Even if you're not using those tools perfectly, at least you've reduced the scavenger hunt by an order of magnitude, because now instead of 5 or 10 places to look, everyone knows at least the one place to look. Now, of course, you want to use that tool, right? But at least you've streamlined, you've streamlined where you're looking, and that's going to save enormous amounts of time. Does that make sense? Mm-hmm.

Okay.

So, so you've got your communication bucket. Now you've got your planning bucket. So there's tools like Asana, Monday, ClickUp. Those are the popular ones right now. And that's where you would want to put things like, hey Steve, could you write an article by Friday about the intersection of flow and operational efficiency? Right? That's something— there's, there's accountability, there's a due date, there's a person you want to be able to know. What are all the things that I asked Steve to do? Did it— what got done? What didn't get done? Or let's say you're relaunching a website for Flow Research Collective and, um, you need to create a video, change the branding, all these different things. That would be a project inside of your project management tool with a bunch of tasks, but it's all in one place. It's easy to retrieve what you're looking for. Right. Um, and then you've got your resources. So every business has knowledge. You have processes, you have SOPs, your core values is something that you want everyone to be able to access, your vision, your org chart. Um, these are all things that should be one or two clicks away and easy to find so that you're not bothering anyone in your company to ask questions. And you have one official source of truth and you don't have risk that if someone leaves, all of the intellectual property leaves with them. How you do payroll, how you onboard people, you've invested time, money, attention, resources in developing these best practices, and you want to make sure that you capture it because it's an asset for your business. And so, those are the 3 buckets: communicate, plan, resource.

Let me ask a related adjacent question. And this is, I spent a lot of time thinking about this particular question when I was reading Come Up for Air. And whenever I hear you talk, you have a huge emphasis on tools, right tool for the right job, knowing. I am super, super concerned with the heavy cost of tool adoption. And I heard you somewhere say that you thought every team probably in a decent-sized company or mid-sized company or small company even probably is using 5 different tools. To me, that seems like an insane onslaught of tools. And like just having information in 5 different buckets would be incredibly stressful. So does it have to be 5? I know you're sort of tool agnostic and But yeah, you think there's a minimum? How do you shrink it down? I know we were talking in an earlier conversation about like the 80/20 version of the Comp4Air system. So what do you think about tool fatigue and the cost of onboarding, etc., etc.? Um, where— what— how do you— how do you cost-benefit that out?

It's a great question. It's probably one of the number one concerns when we work with people, and it's, it's a real thing, you know, at At an extreme, you don't want 50 tools or 100 tools. That's unmanageable. Right. So for sure, there is like an upper limit to how many tools you should be thinking about. But the way I like to think about this is like, let's say you're back camping in that forest and I asked you to chop down a tree, right? You could do it with a Swiss Army knife, or you could do it with a chainsaw. Now let's say if it's like once every 20 years, you have to chop down a tree, maybe you don't need to invest in some fancy chainsaw. Maybe there's some other alternative of something that you've already got that you'll just hack and get it done. But say your job is to chop down trees and it's what you do 10 hours a day. At some point, you're not going to want to be hacking it with a Swiss Army knife because it's like one tool and you don't need to add more tools. At some point, you're chopping enough trees down where you want to invest in that chainsaw, and now you got to manage Another tool, you've got a chainsaw and you got your Swiss Army knife. And so it's the same with business. Like when it comes to communication, like that's a significant amount of time each week that you spend, like you're communicating with the external world and your team. So I would highly recommend using tools built for purpose in those buckets, same with tasks and projects that work needs to get done in. Any organization. So I would highly recommend you use a tool built for purpose. I, you know, we're biased towards Asana, but Monday, ClickUp, um, those are all fantastic too. And same with your internal wiki. So I, I totally understand and, and agree if something is maybe 5 minutes a week or 10 minutes a week, you know, maybe you shouldn't be adding tools for those small things, but something that's multiple hours a week, it almost behooves you. That trade-off just starts becoming really worth it to not try to hack a tool for something it's not built to do versus using a tool built for purpose once it becomes something that ends up being more than a certain percentage of your time. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it totally does. Um, there are two things out of the book that I absolutely love. Uh, one, because it's just— you say it, and like, I've— and I've said it too, but people don't think about it that One is a really simple fix, which is every time you respond to email, your one email is other people's to-do list for you. That's what it is, right? It's other people's to-do list for you. And you and I are totally on the same page on that. I'm always like, it's a low priority on my list of stuff to do today because my stuff is my first priority. Then I'm going to care about your stuff. And you and I— but one of the things you said in the book, that I just love, 'cause nobody just says it this bluntly, is don't respond to an email. Man, every time you respond to an email, you're making, they're gonna respond to your email and you're gonna make, it's 2 or 3, it's an exponential mess. And you're often, the best move is no move, which I think is brilliant. And I totally agree with it. And it's really simple and yet counterintuitive for a lot of people that I've talked about this. I'm like, you don't actually have to do anything with it. They've made work for you. It's your choice.

Yeah, there's 3 things you can do with an email. So my framework for getting to inbox zero, which, which it doesn't mean that you're literally at zero, it means that you have a grip on your email, that you've got less than, say, 20 or 30 emails. But you can either reply, you can archive, or defer any email. And often every email, there's a boomerang effect. You know, the more emails you send, the more you're going to receive. So just Proceed with caution.

Exactly, exactly. The other one, um, that at least people are willing to hear, like, if they hear that and they get it, um, you don't get as much pushback. The one that's all you all and I also really agree with is that organizationally, once you get past the problems of email, the biggest problem is usually meetings. And, um, I— the one of the most common questions I get, you know, I'll give a speech and, you know, 3 people get up to get a Q&A session and one person is going to ask me this question, which is, I'm in, you know, I'm in, how can I, you know, prioritize time for complete concentration and flow when I'm being meeting to death and I'm in meetings all day long? And I always say, I say the same thing. I say, look, I'm going to give you the answer. You're not going to like it. You're gonna— everybody's gonna find it very dissatisfactory and it's not gonna go any further. But here's the answer. Meetings are a waste of time. Don't have them. You're having too many. If it's a meeting with more than 3 people in it, chances are the meeting's about somebody's ego anyways. So that's inefficient. And I essentially, you know, I'm less— you're a lot more polite in your book than I often am in this situation because I'm just on stage and I'm so used to all the pushback. And it's, you know, it doesn't— I've tried everything. I've tried, I've gone out and gotten, you know, quotes from CEOs of Fortune 100 companies who are saying the same thing. So like, maybe you don't want to hear from me, but you can hear from all the— it's still, it doesn't penetrate. And yet it's so true. And it's, you know, it's one of the keys to efficiency.

I think that the top— I think that every business on the face of the planet The two starting points is get a grip on your email and optimize your meetings. I don't necessarily— I don't think that you need to cut all of them, but probably a huge percentage of them can be cut. But those are the top two things. If you dial in your inbox and your meetings, you'll probably get half a day of that full day back almost immediately. And it's not rocket science to do those.

Let me ask you the question that I get asked a lot. Which is I'll be talking to somebody who is not the CEO. Yeah. Or not even in the C-suite, and it'll be the meeting discussion, and their next response is, I don't have any control here. Um, what do you say there? What do you do next?

Thank you for tuning in to Flow Research Collective Radio, and please pardon the brief interruption. I got a question for you. Do you have great ideas and big goals My assumption is you have more skills than most knowledge workers. You're paid well to use your brain, and you've reached this level in your career by being uncommonly effective at what you do. But maybe something's changed. You're typically relentless, but fatigue has started to slow you down. You used to be crystal clear on your priorities, but mounting responsibilities have started to blur your vision. Now, on your best days, you can focus for hours on end on the most critical tasks and blaze through a massive workload with ease. But perhaps you're inconsistent. Some days you can barely focus for more than a few minutes before your attention gets yanked elsewhere. People rely on you, so you're constantly reeled into conversations, task switching, and multitasking. Or perhaps you've got no trouble keeping focus. You can consistently execute on your highest priorities, and you're fully able to manage your time wisely. But you know that something is missing. You're looking for a way to perform at your absolute best, and not just some of the time, but all the time. On your best days, You can get 10 times more work done in half the time, and it feels nearly effortless, and it's enjoyable, and it's energizing. At the end of a 10 out of 10 day, you hit the pillow that night feeling unstoppable. Now, this level of extreme accomplishment is its own reward, but you get the external rewards too by excelling in your profession and your craft. Now, with 10 out of 10 days, you exceed your own expectations and surprise yourself with what you're capable of. And if you've ever suspected there's a way to operate at a 10 out of 10 level every day, You're right, there is. And we're going to show you exactly how to access apex performance like this at will without fail. To train with us at the Flow Research Collective, go to getmoreflow.com. That's getmoreflow.com. All the best.

Well, that's the behavior change with all this stuff in the context of a team is the trickiest part. So give my book to your boss. It's typically my reply. Let's set up a call with you and your— and the decision maker. Um, I think that once people really understand the why— everyone's busy, so no one is just looking for more training on how to use email, or no one's looking for another tool to add. They're looking for the benefit of these things. And so it needs to be really clear, kind of, what's the benefit? Why do I care about this? Why should I prioritize this over the bazillion other things? And getting my book into the boss's hand and/or a phone call typically is the way. But also, if you're an individual listening to this, go and tell your boss, "I did a time audit on my work week for the last couple of weeks, and it turns out that I'm spending less than 20% of time on meaningful stuff." You know, did you realize that between email meetings, scavenger hunt, all this stuff, you know, 50 to 80% of my work week is already eaten up. So any new project you're giving me, it's already— I've only got 5 to 10 hours a week of available time on anything. Did you realize that? You know, I think it's a problem. What do you think? Oh, you know, let's, let's, let's explore ways to optimize this. Okay.

So yeah, that was that. Okay. So the One, talk to— just so people can be familiar with it, give me your dos and don'ts for meetings and how you think about it, right? Because you have a system in the book. And two, have you found that doing the time audit tends to be the thing that tends to convince those? And is that your big lever for that one?

You know, different levers for different people, but I think for the most part, Now that I think that everyone realizes that they're drowning in work, drowning in scavenger hunt, meetings are inefficient. I think that at this point, you don't have to convince people. It's more, um, you know, convincing them or, you know, making them aware that there's a solution. And that's kind of where I'm at. But with meetings, first of all, you have to think about the cost of a meeting. It's so easy to add a meeting. People don't realize how much it costs. I think last year alone in the US, I read an article that $37 billion of, um, was wasted in, in productivity due to meetings. And the funny thing is a lot of the meetings that people are having are around how to make meetings more productive. So that's, that's what's ironic. But every meeting has a cost. If you do a 3-person meeting and each person on your team makes $50 an hour, let's say is their hourly rate, that's a $150 meeting. People aren't thinking Whenever I see a time, a meeting on the calendar, I'm the CEO. So I'm just thinking, what's the cost here? You got a 10-person— you were saying more than 3, uh, is ridiculous. Yeah. Like oftentimes when you start getting into these big meetings, like you're talking multiple thousands of dollars of productivity cost. And so one, how do you reduce that cost? Well, it's a function of the number of people, the hourly rate of those people, the length of the meeting. The frequency of the meeting, right? Et cetera. And so think every meeting, does it need that many people? Think for every meeting, it's weekly. Could we do this biweekly? Think for every meeting, it's an hour. Could I shave off 15 minutes somehow? Or it's 30 minutes. Could I shave off 10 minutes somehow? Right. And then there's strategies that you could think about in order to do that. So for example, pretty much everyone, you fill the time that you're allocated. So if you have an hour meeting, you'll be able to accomplish everything you need. I can guarantee you in 45 minutes. Most people don't utilize agendas, and an agenda can be a really powerful quick win for every, every team. An agenda helps you stay on topic. A lot of meetings go over because it's just starting to go off the rails. Got to get people back on the ranch, follow the agenda. This is the purpose of it. Boom, boom, boom. Also, an agenda is useful because back to that idea of your brain is for having ideas, not holding ideas that I mentioned earlier. People need to brain dump so that you can get into a flow state and you're not walking around thinking about all the different things you got to do. But you don't want people to brain dump in the wrong place. If people are brain dumping into Slack or Microsoft Teams and it's nonstop, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Cool. You've just brain dumped, but now every ping and ding is distracting me and taking me— if I'm in a flow state, it's taking me out of a flow state. I mean, and you know the numbers way better than me. I think I recall from some places I read, what is it? If you're in a flow state and you get a ping or a ding and you're taken out of a flow state, how much time does it take to get back into a flow state?

This was worked on on coders by the guys, Tim Lister and I can't remember his partner, they wrote PeopleSoft. And they, so they, the original work was done on coders and they found that if you're in flow and you get knocked out of flow.

15 minutes?

A 15-minute penalty if you can get back in at all. And if you, you know, if you stop and you also realize that like how precious flow states are, how few, you know what I mean? Yeah, no, I mean, all, I mean, you're preaching to the choir here, of course, right? I mean like, Yes. I agree with you completely.

I think Cal Newport in Deep Work also talked about it and he comes from a software background, but all these pings and dings. So like some of the stuff that we teach too, and I'll get back to agendas, but like notification settings in these tools, they're all defaulted to like maximum notifications. That's not optimal for flow. So what's the optimal notification settings, but having an agenda helps. By the way, Nick, we, for one of the first things we do in Zero to Dangerous.

Is we teach everybody to shut off all your notifications. Oh, really early on, like, first thing we're gonna do is just like— yeah, yeah, because you need complete concentration for flow, right? You're gonna practice distraction management ahead of time. And what's the most distracting thing in the world? You know what I mean?

Like, oh yeah, 100%. Like, I'm— I'm— people are like, why, why, why are you on do not disturb? I'm like, it's— oh, it's nothing to do with you.

Like, no, I mean, in all honesty, I There's 3 or 4 things I got to do with this, but I want a flip phone that does those 3 or 4 things just so you can just— so I can't even have that issue.

100%. So, an agenda, back to that, it allows you a place to give people so they don't need to distract your fellow colleagues in the moment, but you still are able to brain dump and know that whatever brilliant idea or important thing you need to talk about, It's going to get covered. So we have a policy at Leverage. If something's not urgent and it can wait till the next meeting, just add it to the agenda. Don't distract someone in the moment, add it to the agenda. That's a, that's super simple. This isn't rocket science, some of this stuff, and that's a complete game changer. The last thing that you can do as a strategy to reduce the length, so the agenda will help reduce the length, but when you really start thinking about what needs to be covered in a meeting, which is synchronous, right? Synchronous meetings, there's really few things that need to be covered synchronously. Like, we're doing a podcast right now. Like, this would have been hard asynchronously, where like you ask a question, send me a video recording, I reply back with a video. Like, that would be bananas. But like, if you're brainstorming, you know, a new pricing model with your colleagues, like, that's probably a live thing because there's a lot of bouncing the ball back and forth. Right. But if, if I, if my head of marketing is going to present the numbers of May to me, and I'm just going to be sitting there quiet and someone's gonna be talking at me, sharing screen for 15 minutes, that doesn't need to be live. Record a Loom video or your screen and send me a link to that part of it. And now that our meeting can be 45 minutes synchronous. 15 minutes asynchronous, right? Or, you know, whatever ratios you're able to achieve, but that even that alone is a huge win because now I can take that video. And when I'm in the back of an Uber, when I'm going on a walk, whatever, I can now take back control and decide for myself when to watch that video. I could replay it at 2x speed. I could rewind it and watch it 17 times if I need to, whatever, but This comes back to another principle that I have in the book, which is it's not just about saving time. It's about optimizing time. And there's, there's a relationship here with flow, which is time isn't linear. Not all time slots are worth the same, right? And a minute of flow might be the equivalent of an hour when you're in the back of an Uber with no wifi, stressed out with a million things on your brain. Right? So not all time slots are worth the same. Your time might be worth $100 an hour on average, but different time slots on your calendar, it's like a heat map. When I look at a calendar, I'm seeing colors and heat map. I know that Monday morning at 9:00 AM, after I've had a relaxing weekend and I'm waking up at 5:30, I do my yoga, I do my CrossFit, I have a coffee, I do my journaling, et cetera, et cetera. I know come 9:00, my brain's at full horsepower. I'm a beast at 9:00 AM on a Monday. What I can do in that time period, that time slot might be worth $1,000 to me or $10,000 to me. Right. So freeing up 15 minutes at 9 o'clock might not be $25, a quarter of a hundred. If that's the calculation you have for your time, that might be worth $2,500 in that one time slot. You see what I mean? So it's not just about saving time. It's also about. Optimizing time. And this is where I'm really interested in your content, right? Because not every minute or every second or every hour is worth the same. And going asynchronous with parts, you don't have to kill the whole meal, the whole meal meeting, but if you can reduce the length and shift some to asynchronous. And now at 7 o'clock on a Friday, when I'm in the back of an Uber and my brain is dead and I have, don't have my laptop or my wifi. My time might be worth $25 an hour during that time. So go and do the time shift and watch the video then. That is a very easy strategy to implement that could yield millions and millions of dollars for your business.

Let me, uh, direction change, uh, and then Ryan, I know you got a couple more questions. I'll kick it back to you so you can talk. I want to just ask my last question sort of off this and sort of not. It's one of the things that I think about So thinking about this in terms of tool use, and I also think about this in terms of preserving systems, right, in terms of how we do things. And one of the things I'm always concerned about when we adopt systems is every system has built-in blind spots, right? You're optimizing and you have blind spots. And I, knowing this, we try to have meetings on a regular basis where we literally, okay, we've adopted these systems, been using it for 3 months. What have we been not looking at? Because we've been relying on this system. And, but that I found is inefficient over time, those meetings start to go away, they're easy to like, you know, kick out. And then suddenly, you know, you're a year into a system, and you've got real blind spots. How do you work around that? How do you think about tool-induced blind spots, systemization blind spots?

Well, I, I think that these things need to be rolled out properly. I've seen it firsthand. I've seen it with clients. You know, people think that just paying, pulling out their credit card and paying for a tool is going to change everything and fix everything. But if it's not rolled out properly, if the team doesn't understand the purpose of the tool, how to use it, but more importantly, when to use it and when not to use it, it actually could hurt your team's productivity rather than help. And so You know, I built a whole business around this. Like, that's why I advise people to go through proper training in this stuff, because if you don't, you might be actually hurting your business by implementing some of these tools oftentimes. But I think you have to do things strategically. And if, say, you're listening to this right now and a lot of this is foreign and you've got, you know, you, you're thinking to yourself, oh my God, I've got to roll out Slack, I've got to get to inbox zero, I don't have any project management software, I need to do a project management software, I don't have an internal wiki. Yeah, the most important thing with any tool rollout too is you do one thing at a time and you celebrate. You, you get it to a point where you're actually adding value. If you just half-ass try to roll out 10 things at once, you're definitely going to be losing time, not gaining time. And I, I like to think of time like an asset, just like stock, like a stock in the stock market or real estate. It's an asset. And just like you have the concept of return on investment with normal investments, you have return on time with this stuff. So don't try to fix a million things. Like, what's going to generate the highest ROT, return on time? It's probably the email or the meetings that we talked about, right? So with those things, it could be that literally in a few hours you're able to now save a few hours a week for the rest of your life. That's a really high return on time. Focus on that. Give yourself a bit of breathing space, get that, get that return, and then move on to the next thing. Some things might take weeks or months, but I find that it's best to kind of stick to one thing and get the value out of it before moving on to the next. Because oftentimes there's a tipping point and you kind of, you're in the negative until you hit a certain point and then it starts getting positive. And it takes you a certain period to kind of recoup the investment that you've put into it. Um, an example that sometimes, uh, makes that more clear is, um, imagine you had a broken sink with a pipe that's broken and water is overflowing. Oftentimes people just want to mop, mop the floor because it takes a minute and you can move on to the next thing, but fixing the pipe, say, takes an hour. Well, after 60 days of the minute a day with the mop, you'll have broken even by fixing the pipe. And now for the rest of your life, you don't have to waste that minute. And so different activities in your business have different kind of break-even points for that return on time. And it's important that you're aware kind of what's the investment versus the return, and you prioritize and do one at a time.

So let me see if I have this right. I call a plumber, the pipe's broken. No, I missed something. Sorry. Um, thank you.

I was just—

no, I did that. No, I think that's actually a great— that it's a great example. I'm totally kidding you, Nick.

Yeah, so basically this is all about plumbing.

It's all about— well, by the way, people, you know, people— I'll meet people on planes and I'll be, you know, they'll be like, the Flow Research Collective, what? We study plumbing. Plumbing design, really flow. You know, I've—

this— I'm sure that you've worked with a variety of industries. I'm sure you've worked with plumbers. I'm sure you've worked with almost everything.

I have actually worked with plumbers. Yeah, yeah, a bunch of them.

We have, we have too. They— everyone, they need, they need to save time.

Yeah, no doubt. Uh, Nick, as we wrap up this conversation, I'd love to hear a little bit more about this new podcast that you launched with Jay. I think the model is just Fascinating. So share a little bit more about the Optimize podcast.

Thank you for asking. Yeah, it's a, it's a really fun, fun podcast. So Jay Abraham, if you don't know who he is, he's like a living legend in the marketing and business strategy space. He's been around forever. And he's really an expert at optimizing, coming up with strategies and thinking outside of the box on ways to generate more revenue, through referral partnership, you know, seeing blind spots that, you know, you're not seeing. And I'm much more of an expert on the efficiency, how to save time, your operation side. And so right now we're not charging. I mean, Jay charges crazy numbers, like he's like 6 figures a day to work with him. It's, it's, uh, quite high. But oftentimes he comes up with 1 or 2 big, big ideas that are worth millions to you so people can justify people can justify it. But right now we're not charging. We're just trying to get really interesting businesses, typically at least 8 figures, and we're doing a consultation and we're not asking— it's a different format. We're really just asking, what's your business model? How do you make money? How do you get clients? What are your biggest logjams? And that's kind of a starting point. And then it's just a freeform pull back the curtain, see a sneak peek into how our brains work. And we're just asking a million different questions with the ultimate goal of how do we come up with one or two big ideas that could be worth millions of dollars to this business. And we've had chocolate companies, we've had private jet companies, we've had people from Mayo Clinic, distribution companies. Every conversation's different, but it's highly educational. Um, and it's, it's been a lot of fun. Every single—

Yeah, it's got to be fun for you. That just sounds like a killer. I mean, it sounds like a killer format for the host. Like, what I like, what I like about it is, um, it takes the reality of actually doing a podcast, um, into consideration because it, it's going to be scintillating and fun for you guys for sure.

If you guys ever want to be on the, on the podcast, would love to have you, but it's a lot of fun. Every single one, I learn a lot from it and vice versa. And it kind of keeps you on your toes too, you know, because you don't know— we don't know ahead of time what direction it's going to go in. They might say something and then the whole thing takes a left turn and now we're talking about something that's not unpredictable, but it's— we go in whatever direction is going to provide the most value for the guest.

Sweet. You gave us a hint about who gets to apply, but is it, is it just kind of A little bit open to—

Yeah. So if you go to the, the optimized podcast.com, um, you can check, take a look at the episodes, feel free to subscribe. Um, and you can also apply there and, you know, click the like button, rate it, do it all. But, uh, anyone can apply and we're not, we're not rigid with, with qualifications ultimately. Um, if someone has Um, yeah, probably the only real thing is you really have to have a grip on your business. Like, we're gonna be asking kind of pretty specifics, so you wanna, you wanna show up kind of prepared for that. Um, but for the most part, we're just looking for an interesting conversation, interesting, interesting opportunities and businesses so that we can help, you know, come up with some new ideas that are going to be worth a ton.

Right on. I will absolutely be tuning in. Nick, you also, you know, you've got your book Come Up for Air, which is just a treasure trove of practical information that people can begin applying. Also on your website, the book's website, you offer, I don't know how many.

What's the URL?

Yeah, there's like 20 different resources there. How can people learn more about your work?

Yeah, thank you for asking. So, um, the website for the book is comeupforair.com. HarperCollins is my publisher and they didn't want it going beyond 320 pages. And I'm a productivity geek, so you can imagine if I weren't, this would have been like a 1,400-page book. So we spent an incredible amount of time building additional bonus resources to supplement the book. Um, and You know, there's quizzes, there's PDFs, there's playbooks. And so throughout the book, in order to keep it at the 320, we say, you know, if you want more information on how to do this, go to comeupforair.com. And so there you can find out where to get the book and get these additional bonus resources. And then if you, if you need further help, I've got an entire company called Leverage, which is getleverage.com, which does training and consulting and all of this stuff. So we've got various programs to help you and your team be successful with email and all the different tools that we've talked about on today's show.

So cool, Nick. Thank you so much for hanging out.

Thank you for having me. I love the stuff that you guys are doing and I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation and this intersection of flow and operational efficiency is extremely interesting space to me.

It's a cool space. And there's, even from a research perspective, there's just a bunch of like, it's very, very clear. It's very much on everybody's radar and it's hard to probe. So if for no other, you know, like just, just for the love of good research and, and, uh, some equations, the work isn't done here until we have an equation or two.

Love me a good equation.

Awesome.

All right, everybody.

Hey, Stephen, thank you. Yeah, thanks for taking us down the rabbit hole. Everyone tuning in, I hope you got your takeaways jotted down. If not, no worries. We'll be sure to drop all the resources that Nick shared about in our show notes. And until next time, thanks so much. We'll catch you later.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you, everyone. Nick, again, thanks again. Ryan, great as always.

See ya.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. You've probably heard how flow states can increase your productivity and creativity by up to 500%. But are we cherry-picking that data? When you train with us at the Flow Research Collective, what are the hard facts? Well, at the most extreme level with flow, you can accomplish more in a day than the average knowledge worker accomplishes in an entire month. That might sound like a radical claim, but first consider what average is based on data. The average knowledge worker does real work for only 2.3 hours per day. Every week, they spend half a day duplicating work they did the week before. They check their email 36 times per hour. They waste 36 hours in unnecessary meetings per month. They're interrupted 56 times per day, and it takes 23 minutes to focus again after a disruption. And they only get 11 minutes of focus before being interrupted. These staggering stats come from research done by Gallup, the American Institute of Stress, and the World Health Organization. Now, If what I just described is something you can relate to, we're here to intervene. With flow and leverage, it's possible to get more done in the next year than what some achieve in their entire career. And check this out. On average, this is what happens to the clients who complete our flagship program, Zero to Dangerous. They reduce their stress levels by 40%. They decrease their susceptibility to procrastination and distraction by 28%. They increase their motivation by 41%. They are 31.74% more clear on what they want in life and how to attain it. Their confidence in being able to handle unforeseen changes and challenges shoots up by 27%. They go from spending less than 1 hour per day in flow to consistently flowing for 3 to 4 hours per day. They see a fourfold decrease in hours wasted per day. Before training with us, things like exhaustion, burnout, overwhelm, or stress caused them to lose 3 days of work per week. After the program, they only lose one day a week, if any, and they trend toward wasting no days at all. The data is clear. We know that if you put in the work, Zero to Dangerous will work for you. To train with us, just go to getmoreflow.com and apply for Zero to Dangerous.

All the best.

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